I’ve been away from this for a couple of weeks — not intentionally, though. There was one week where I was working double shifts at my job, followed by single shifts on all three days of the Labor Day weekend. (All together now: “Awww… you poor baby!”)
That was followed by a week at my parents’ house for Rosh Hashana — the Jewish New Year — and my birthday (Don’t ask!) and my parents’ anniversary (I was born on their first — can you think of a more wonderful wedding present?)
My folks have an old Compaq Presario one-piece, with a 100MHz Pentium I, 48Mb of RAM, a 14.4K modem and a 1Gb hard drive. which is filled up with Windows95, AOL 4.0, and all the bundled crap programs which were pre-installed. But — most important — the computer holds a copy of the DOS-based Hoyle Card Games. Mom plays every variety of Solitaire whenever she can convince my father to get away from his game of Gin Rummy for a few minutes. His favorite opponent is a blonde female character named Lisa, whom he accuses of cheating. (This is retirement!)
Unfortunately, their AOL was incapable of maintaining a connection long enough for me to blog, and hooking up my own laptop meant that I had to go through all the rigamarole of unhooking their phone for as long as I needed to be online. My father is an attorney, so he’s always had a second line in the house for business. As soon as any of their relatives or friends get a busy signal on the main line, they dial the business line, which we usually don’t answer because that’s what the answering machine is for. I thought to plug my computer into that line, but he’s got splitters on top of splitters, connecting his computer, fax machine, answering machine, and phone. Just figuring out which of the jumble of wires would give me an outside line gave me a headache instead.
Being disconnected felt strange. I haven’t been without a fast computer connection for so long that I found I was nearly incapable of functioning normally. Reading the newspaper offline or watching TV news seemed so… un-enriched. No links to click for related items, no background info, no follow-up, no commentary. My yelling at the TV or the Times served only to annoy my folks, my wife and the dog.
I did spend some time, though, thinking about blogging and how to incorporate it into my life. Some bloggers tend towards the Robot Wisdom single-line-and-a-link model, while others — like me — tend to longer pieces with more links, and therefore require a lot more time to compose. (I wish I could be like Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, who manages to produce long, well thought-out and composed pieces with great frequency.) Besides this blog, I’m also committed to contributing to The Knowledge Pool, a community blog on the (related) topics of eLearning and Knowledge Management.
I’m looking for the perfect time of day to do my writing, and as soon as I can carve out a suitable chunk of time, I plan on writing consistently. My writing professor at SUNY Binghamton, Larry Woiwode, told us that writing wasn’t a romantic craft; it is as dirty and backbreaking and unrewarding as the farming life which took the first joint of one of his fingers. And yet, farmers and writers do their jobs because it is all they know how to do, and if they are going to do it, they may as well try to do it with conviction.
